In 1641, the total annual production of steel in Huamei was close to 250,000 tons. But this figure actually peaked at 270,000 tons as early as 1636, and has been in a state of decline.

At present, there are three main steel producing areas in Huamei, one is the state-owned United Iron and Steel Company under the state-owned energy and mining group in the island area outside the capital, Manchester, with an annual output of about 170,000 tons; Second, Beiyuan City, a heavy industry town in the north of Qingcheng City, the capital of Haizhou, is still a steel plant of the state-owned United Iron and Steel Company, with an annual output of 60,000 tons; The last one is Binzhou Yacheng City, Yacheng Iron and Steel Company, jointly invested by North Industries Group and General Industry Group, with an annual output of about 20,000 tons.

Behind Huamei Steel's annual production of more than the world's combined production is the massive demand for iron ore and coal resources. Among them, the annual demand for iron ore produced by steel in the islands outside Manchester exceeds 350,000 tons, and the main source is the town of Robert on the west coast of Manchester Bay.

Founded in 1630 to develop the nearby Newark Iron Ore Mine in what would become New Jersey, the town of Robert (Elizabeth City), located on the northwest bank of the outer islands of Manchu, was named after the only cavalry corporal who landed in Newark many years ago and died in the Susquehana War, and today has more than 11,000 settlers, most of whom work related to iron ore mining and transportation.

Under the guiding ideology of making every effort to improve the efficiency of local iron ore production and transportation, a 10-kilometer-long mining railway was completed in 1639 at a cost of nearly $250,000, becoming the first pilot project of the country's future railway plan.

Powered by a 320-horsepower steam locomotive, more than 500 tonnes of iron ore are transported from the mining area to the port of Roberttown every day. It is then transported by large barge to the industrial area of the outer islands of Manchu on the opposite shore. In the past, it would have been almost as many as a hundred heavy-duty two-horse trailers to complete this volume, and the steam train has reduced daily transportation costs by 70%. The convenient supply of iron ore in the vicinity once caused the domestic steel price to drop by 10%.

Due to the limited mining scale of the mining area, even with the input of various modern steam mining machinery and steam locomotives, the annual supply of iron ore to Roberttown has reached the limit of 180,000 tons, and the rest must be supplied by Xidian Town and Jiangkou Town in the north of the Song River, and Yushu City on the north shore of Long Island Bay in the east.

However, as the reserves of early iron ore near West Point were depleted and mining became more difficult, the mining industry in West Point began to shrink. Economic development has already begun to turn. It will be difficult to maintain steel production in the industrial areas of the outer islands of Manchester City. What's even more tangled is this. During the ice period in the middle and upper reaches of the Song River every winter, the iron ore mining supply in the mining area on the north bank of the Baima River in Jiangkou Town, the second largest iron ore mine in China, will fall into an annual state of suspension.

In contrast, although the steel output of Beiyuan City in Haizhou is not as large as that of the industrial area outside the city, it is better than the iron ore and coal mines that can be sourced locally. Moreover, the local area also has the capacity of deep processing of steel. General Industries Group invested in the construction of a machine processing plant in the area early on. Beiyuan City, with a population of 17,000, has become the first heavy industrial city in Haizhou. Huamei's steel products exported to Europe, Beiyuan City accounted for nearly half.

The only fly in the ointment is the low grade of marsh iron ore near Beiyuan City. And the scale of mining has also reached the bottleneck limit. It is difficult to increase the steel production capacity, so it has to rely on external iron ore input to supplement, so Spain, Portugal, Sweden and England have become the raw material import channels of Haizhou's iron and steel industry, and the total number of European iron ore and a small amount of crude iron transported to Beiyuan City every year is more than 10,000 tons.

State-owned groups have almost monopolized the vast majority of the domestic iron ore supply, and the private steel industry in Binzhou Yacheng City seems to be a bit "grandpa doesn't love grandma and grandma". Binzhou's small-scale iron ore mines had little mining value in later generations, but they were more than nothing, and they had to rely heavily on iron ore imports from Virginia, Cuba, Brazil and Nanshan, and the cost of steel was much higher than that of the state-owned steel mills. Fortunately, behind Yacheng Iron and Steel Company is North Industries Group, which is mostly engaged in the production of special metals and high-quality steel, so the high added value of the products also offsets the disadvantage of raw material import costs.

If domestic demand for iron ore can barely be guaranteed now, the supply of coal is even tighter. For no other reason, the output of several coal mines in the middle and upper reaches of the Song River accounts for 50% of the country's total coal supply! The annual winter of the Song River is frozen, and most of the pressure on coal supply is on several towns in Binzhou, and all towns in the south are affected by different degrees.

As early as the winter of 1637, the cabinet led by Wu Yuanyi announced the "Binzhou Iron and Steel and Coal Industry Development Plan", and decided to officially march into the western interior of Binzhou to develop the outrageous iron ore and coal resources of Pennsylvania in the future.

The scale of the program will span several years, and the overall implementation process will be divided into two steps. First, the river channel from the Delaware River to the Lehigh River was dredged, and then a new town was established in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania's famous heavy industrial city.

Prior to this, the town of Xinbao in Binzhou had been established at the end of 1636. The town is located more than 40 kilometers northeast of the city of Yacheng, which is the terminus of the Delaware River (Delaware) and later the site of Trenton, the capital of New Jersey.

Newcastle's population is just over 4,500 people, and it was originally lured by cheap land to attract some old immigrants to move in, but in the past few years, Newcastle has only a relatively rudimentary agricultural economy, which is considered the slowest economic development of the local town. Aside from the vast plains, meadows, swamps and forests surrounding the city, Newcastle itself has no special potential for development.

From here, however, continuing up the Delaware River and turning west onto the Lehigh River, river vessels can reach Bethlehem, one of the world's rare coals and iron ores, where the abundant coal and iron ore once gave rise to the famous Bethlehem Iron and Steel Company.

The dredging of the Delaware River began in earnest in the spring of 1638 with more than 2,000 Dutch West India Company mercenary captives and some Indian Iroquois laborers captured in Recife, Brazil, that year. As the U.S. Army continued to cover along the Delaware River toward the middle reaches, a large number of Susquehana Indian prisoners of war continued to fill the nearly 100-kilometer-long inland river dredging project.

In the most critical period of 1639. More than 5,000 prisoners of war of all types were involved in the Delaware-Lehigh waterway. In the sub-zero winter, the prisoners of war also had to dig in the icy river; In the heat of summer, the POWs would even stand in the raging river for a whole day until both legs were soaked. Although the process was brutal, the most immediate result was that the cost of the project was very low, less than a third of the cost of the White Horse River Sectional Canal, which was carried out during the same period.

At the beginning of 1640, the dredging of the inland waterway was completed, and the inland river fleet arrived near the site of Bethlehem, and the stone monument for the laying of the foundation stone of "Binzhou Jingu City" was draped in red under the cloudy gaze of thousands of scrawny prisoners of war. Another important city has been added to the gorgeous map. But in the last two years of labor. At least a quarter of the POWs were buried forever on both sides of the river.

Right now. In less than two years, with the help of key national investment, the population of Jingu City has rapidly expanded to more than 3,000 people, including a small number of "excellent" Dutch mercenary prisoners of war and Indian prisoners. They were pardoned by the American Congress in China. Temporary settlement rights were then granted. bid farewell to the miserable status of slave labor, and turned into an ordinary miner who still has hope for the rest of his life.

In just one year, Jingu City has become the fifth key iron ore producing area in China after Robert Town, Jiangkou Town, Beiyuan City and Yushu City. Coal production also accounts for 5% of the country's total. As the town grows further, it's only a matter of time before it comes out on top.

Not only the primary mining industry, but also the joint division of the state-owned energy and mining group and the North Industries Group, Jingu will have its own steel smelting and processing industry in the future. At that time, a new heavy industry base will rise in China, and use hundreds of kilometers of inland water transportation to transport the "grain" needed for the country's industrial expansion to Yacheng, and then transfer it to all parts of the country.

However, if you open the map, you will find that Yacheng is about 160 kilometers away from the capital Manchester in a straight line, but all the merchant ships traveling between Manchester and Yacheng must bypass the entire Binzhou Peninsula (New Jersey Peninsula) from Delaware Bay, the shortest distance is close to 400 kilometers, the journey takes about 24 hours, and it is not possible to use large river barges.

Therefore, the second step of the "Binzhou Iron and Steel and Coal Industry Development Plan" was officially announced on January 1, 1642, and the relevant national project budget was also fully prepared for this.

Starting from the two ends of Roberttown and Newcastle Town, a railway with a length of more than 80 kilometers will be built, and all kinds of goods going back and forth between Yacheng and Manchester City will only need to be equipped with low-cost inland barges on the Delaware River inland waterway from Yacheng to Newcastle Town, and the rest of the transportation work will be undertaken by the railway transportation from Roberttown to Newcastle Town. Not to mention the ability to save a lot of merchant shipping capacity, the railway transportation time is only less than 3 hours, and it can basically be done rain or shine.

Once the railway is completed, Newcastle Town can provide the most convenient transportation conditions for Binzhou's steel and coal transportation to Manchester City, and will also become a water and land transportation hub and commodity logistics and production center connecting Songzhou and Binzhou.

After calculating the unit cost of land rail transportation in Songzhou and Binzhou, it still seems that it will be much higher than the original whole sea transportation, but from the perspective of actual economic radiation capacity and national defense strategic benefits, it is a very cost-effective strategic investment.

This is the longest railway built in China, and it is also the first "trans-state" railway, and it is also a real project for long-distance railway construction. Although the overall terrain is flat, a railway bridge over the Lalitan River with a span of more than 150 meters will be built in the middle, and there will be plenty of forest and meadow swamps along the construction section. If you add in a service road that accompanies the railway, the total amount of work is much larger than any other land transportation project undertaken in these years, with a total investment of more than $3 million and a construction period of at least two years. To this end, the Ministry of Finance and the local government of Binzhou will bear the cost of the project and issue the first railway fund-raising bond in China to be used to pave the railway and set up a railway operating company.

As soon as the "Luoxin Railway" project plan was announced, the domestic demand in steel, machinery, cement, asphalt, stone building materials, transportation, construction and other related industries in China and the United States jumped sharply, and several industry stocks were also highly sought after under the encouragement of securities brokers. The Luoxin Railway fund-raising bonds were snapped up by "insiders" within a few days earlier, and the share that flowed outside could only make ordinary citizens drink a symbolic sip of soup.

After years of immigration expansion, the current domestic labor force is still sufficient, not to mention that there are thousands of Dutch mercenaries and Indian prisoners of war who "atonement" can be used to make great use, and a single Luoxin railway does not seem to be enough. As a result, another traffic project comparable to the Luoxin Railway was also launched by the Senate Science and Technology Commission, that is, the "Chesapeake-Delaware Canal Canal", which "penetrated" the root of the northern section of the Delaware Peninsula in the future, and is now known as the "Magnolia Peninsula Canal".

The Mulan Peninsula Canal is designed to be about 22 kilometers long, traversing the narrowest root of the northern part of the Magnolia Peninsula and connecting the future Delaware Bay and Chesapeake Bay. The first phase of the canal is 50 meters wide and 8 meters deep, and because the terrain is relatively flat, the water depth of the canal is only affected by the tides, so there is no need to build complex locks, and the estimated construction cost per kilometer is much lower than that of the Baima River Canal in Songzhou. In this regard, another town was established at the western exit of the canal and named it Magnolia Town.

The construction of the Mulan Peninsula Canal is expected to start in 1643 with a construction period of two years, and once completed, it will reduce the water freight voyage from Yacheng to Jiangling City by nearly 400 kilometers, and form the shortest transportation line from Songzhou to Binzhou in the southernmost part of the Luoxin Railway, which can save a lot of capacity of ocean going merchants. The economic development of the south of Binzhou will be more closely linked with the economic centers of the north such as Manchester City, and the strategic development of the south of North America will be accelerated.

In addition, the Songzhou Baima Valley Canal Project, which is being implemented in stages, will officially reach a new peak from 1642 onwards, and the direct or indirect labor force engaged in the above-mentioned traffic projects will account for more than 15% of the total labor force in the country. (To be continued......)